Snarkocalypse, Soon!

today’s strip

Before I mock Summer and her new, sleek, angular, pointy appearance, a few words on the looming heat death of the Funkyverse. Obviously, without a daily strip, we will not be doing daily posts anymore after December 31. The site will remain alive for the foreseeable future, and we do hope we get new FW material to complain about. It’s not going to shutter right then and right there. But this is Batiuk we’re talking about here, so there’s just no way of knowing how it’ll actually go. He might drop 365 new FW strips on his blog on January 2, or he might do a feeble, one-off comic book cover eight months from now, or anything in-between. There will not be a re-read from the beginning, nor will we switch to “Crankshaft”. The daily strips are the engine that runs the whole thing and without those, it’ll never be the same. I’m not sure how or if sporadic posts will work, but that’s a bridge to cross at some later date.

From here on out, TFH and I will be sharing SoSF hosting duties. We are bandying around some ideas, and we very much want to give our beloved guest authors, both present and past, AT LEAST one more shot before the end, and see what happens after that. We likewise hope our faithful readers will remain entertained and engaged to the end, and we’ll do what we can to make that happen. For TFH and I, it marks the end of a long, long road. While Lord knows it wasn’t “hard work” by any means, it did require a daily commitment, and by “daily” I mean DAILY. FW runs literally every day, without fail, and we have always ensured that our loyal readers had a working link to the stupid strip, as well as a place to clown on it. We never missed a post, ever. We feel we owe it to ourselves and SoSF itself to ride it out to the very end, and savor it while we can. For me, SoSF is part writing exercise, part deranged personal vendetta, but mainly it’s been a labor of love. And I’ll be touching on that a lot more in the coming weeks.

So anyway, yeah, how about this new, aerodynamic, de-shaggified Summer, huh? I’m assuming that he brought her back upon learning that FW would be ending, as he didn’t seem to care too much for the last ten years. And, interestingly enough, I don’t care now! It’s just like Batiuk to be wasting time on Harley the janitor when he has barely six more weeks to go. The strip is jammed full of long-running characters, it’s winding down to the end, and he’s focused on Ruby and Harley.

And now, from the SoSF arc recap archives, a Great Moment In SoSF History:

Dec 27, 2010 – Jan. 2, 2011
Les hosts a New Year’s Eve party. Susan announces that her divorce is final. At the stroke of midnight, Les is smooching Lisa’s Ghost.

Man, that was a real humdinger. Easily one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. Les was furiously making out with himself, while a horrified Cayla and Susan looked on in revulsion. That was Cayla’s second hairdo, her “dreads” look she was sporting for a while. See, back then, Les was still only “seeing” Cayla, and Susan was still lurking around, shamelessly throwing herself at Les at every opportunity. Meanwhile, Les was still madly in love with Ghost Lisa, who was a constant presence back then, despite being dead, which happened in a story arc you may have heard about once or twice. When you look back on that period now, it’s amazing how action-packed it was compared to, say, 2020 or something.

Diary of a Dead Housewife

Hey readers! As the Batiuk Retirement Watch continues, your friends here at SoSF are putting our heads together to figure out what happens to this blog after the 31st of December…look for updates soon. –TFH

A couple years ago, my older sister showed me something interesting that she’d found among our late mother’s personal belongings: a number of pocket size “junior diaries,” one for each year, spanning a number of years from the early days of her marriage to my father through my own childhood years. While we were a little curious about what these little books might contain, my sis and I both agreed that we just wouldn’t feel comfortable reading through them. Though I did ask my sis if I could keep the one from my birth year.

Nobody connected to St. Lisa seems to have any such qualms about perusing her most private writing. Summer’s already read through Lisa’s account of being raped and impregnated by Frankie (and was even prepared to blackmail him by reading it on YouTube). When Les was struggling to write the Lisa’s Story screenplay, Cayla helpfully fetched Lisa’s journal from the bookshelf. Though she’s been dead for fifteen years, no FW character has dispensed more wisdom, between her journal (presumably journals; that same book probably wouldn’t contain entries from high school through her cancer battle unless she wrote really, really small) and her hours upon hours of video messages.

Meta-mucil

TB goes full on meta in today’s strip… could this be a preview of what we’ll see over the next few weeks? Is everything else from here on going to be bizarrely (and blandly) self-referential? Are we in for even more unnecessary acknowledgements that these characters all of a sudden know they are in a comic strip? I suppose we will have to wait and see, though the wait won’t be too long now.

Meta references can certainly work, but are not inherently interesting or funny, nor are they funny in the context of this strip and story arc, or in the context of TB’s real life partial retirement for that matter. What is funny, however, is that Ruby joined Atomik Komix over 3 years ago to much fanfare, specifically to draw Wayback Wendy I might add, and she’s peacing out after drawing the cover of issue #4! And we all thought Phil Holt was a slow worker

And that’s a wrap for my latest and possibly last time blogging here at Son Of Stuck Funky. No goodbyes here, but I do want to thank some folks. Thank you to TFH and Epicus for running this place for the past 12 and a half years and for trusting me as a guest writer here over the past 8 years. Thanks to my fellow guest writers for keeping this site reliably humming for years and much thanks to all of you SOSFers for coming back and reading day after day in spite of my silly wonderings and regular typos. I’ve written over 500 of these things, believe it or not! But for me these posts are mostly a glorified header, the best content generally comes from you all in the comments. I can only hope that you have enjoyed reading some of my words even 1/100th as much as I have enjoyed being a part of this community.

And so, I will close this post the same way I wrote my entire first week of posts…

Ruby the Grate

In case you missed it, we are in the final weeks of Funky Winkerbean. Tom Batiuk appears to be reluctantly retiring the strip much in the same way he’s written Ruby as reluctantly retiring from Atomik Komix this week and in today’s strip. The timing of this thin gruel of a story arc and TB’s fairly muted announcement is certainly no coincidence. Most all of us here at SOSF, despite speculating for over a decade on when and how this thing would end, are probably still processing the suddenness of the announcement, how soon it will become reality, and what that means for this wonderful community going forward.

But enough wallowing about, let’s leave that to the strip and try to get back to business as usual. I guess today’s strip is aiming for bittersweet, but it largely is coming across as just bitter. You can’t mask your true feelings in a wall of smirks, TB… And even if the strip wasn’t ending at the close of this year, I’m guessing we were never going to see Chester meet with the building manager by looking in a mirror anyways. I’d say “a pity”, but, you know, it’s not. It’s really not.

Excre-mint

Here is today’s strip. You all go ahead and tear into it. Not sure I could do much better than the post title anyways.

Sorry, two days to go on my stint and I’m already running on fumes. Even WordPress knows this, somehow. It’s kind of creepy, to be honest… I’ll press on these next two days, but I’m going to set a spell today and see you in the comments.

Speaking of running on empty (and burying the lede, for that matter), Tom Batiuk dropped some news late yesterday that may or may not be relevant to this story arc, the last several months of speculation in the comments, and the future of this website. Some of you all commented on it yesterday. I have plenty of thoughts on this, as I am sure many of you all do. As with today’s strip, I’ll see you in the comments to discuss.

I’m guessing this will get more ink than the strip…